Cannes 2009: Jane Campion, Alain Resnais, Brillante Mendoza, Johnnie To, Lou Ye

Peter Bradshaw on Bright Star (with Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, above) in The Guardian:
"Jane Campion has put herself in line for her second Palme d’Or here at the Cannes film festival with a film which I think could be the best of her career; an affecting and deeply considered study of the last years in the short life of John Keats, and the ecstasy of loss which suffuses his love affair with Fanny Brawne – a love thwarted not due to illness, but to a pernicious web of money worries, social scruples and irrelevant male loyalties."
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Maggie Lee on Kinatay in The Hollywood Reporter:
"Festival darling Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay is a long night’s journey into the [...]

2006 New York Film Critics Award Winners

U.S. film critics continue to make a few curious choices.
At the 2006 New York Film Critics Circle Awards, announced earlier today, the most interesting winner was the best foreign language film: the somber 1969 French Resistance drama L’Armée des ombres / Army of Shadows, adapted for the screen (from a novel by Joseph Kessel) and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Both Melville (born Grumbach) and Kessel were French Jews who joined the Resistance in 1941.
Though made more than 35 years ago, L’Armée des ombres was only this year released in the United States. Yesterday, the film won a Special Mention from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. In the cast: Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Simone Signoret [...]